Three levels of stone, timber and brick rising through a pine forest — a residence designed to belong to Padhar before it belongs to anyone else.
Some sites don't need a design imposed on them — they need one that listens.
That is exactly the brief our studio carried to Padhar, a quiet, forested pocket of District Mandi in Himachal Pradesh, where Sh. Tilak Ji is preparing to build a new family residence. The plot sits on a gentle slope, framed by tall pines on either side and open to a wide, layered view of the Mandi ranges beyond. Very few sites offer this combination of privacy, elevation and outlook, and the design responds to all three at once.
This blog walks through the thinking behind the project — the site, the massing, the materials, and the way each floor has been planned to serve a different rhythm of daily life. It is written for anyone in Padhar, Mandi, or the wider Himachal region who is imagining a similar home for their own family, and for anyone simply curious about how a hillside residence like this comes together on paper before it comes together in stone.
Padhar sits at a comfortable elevation in District Mandi, close enough to the town for daily convenience, yet far enough into the pine belt that mornings arrive with mist and birdsong rather than traffic. The plot chosen for Sh. Tilak Ji's residence slopes down from the road, which is often treated as a limitation on hill sites — here, it becomes the single biggest design opportunity.
Rather than cutting and levelling the land into a flat pad, the house steps down with the natural gradient. The ground floor tucks a covered car porch and garage directly at road level, so vehicles arrive without a ramp or a long climb. The living levels rise above and slightly behind this base, lifted just enough to catch the valley view over the tree line. This single decision — building with the contour instead of flattening it — is what allows every major room in the house to open toward the mountains rather than toward a retaining wall.
Orientation was worked out early, using the site's natural light path. The main glazed façade faces the open valley and the evening sun, which is visible in the warm, golden quality of light across the stone and timber cladding. Bedrooms and living spaces were placed along this face; service areas, staircases and storage sit toward the rear and sides, where the forest presses closer to the building.
The residence reads as a composition of stacked, staggered volumes rather than a single flat-fronted block — a deliberate move on a hill site, where a house is seen from below, above and across the valley all at once, not just from the street.
The ground floor is organised around arrival. A gabled, dark-tiled porch roof shelters the car porch and garage, finished in warm coursed stone with a rounded stone archway marking the main entrance. This is the level where the family gathers with guests, greets visitors at the door, and where the everyday business of a home — parking, storage, entry — is handled without intruding on the quieter floors above.
Above the entrance, the first floor steps back slightly to create a covered terrace — a semi-outdoor room finished in exposed brick, furnished for sitting out in the evening with a view straight down the valley. Tall, black-framed glazing wraps the living and dining areas behind it, so the boundary between indoor and outdoor living stays porous through most of the year. This is the floor built for daily life: morning tea on the terrace, family meals inside, and long evenings watching the light change over the ridgelines.
The second floor is the most private level, given over to bedrooms behind large, full-height windows dressed with soft curtains for evening privacy. Structurally, this is also where the building's most distinctive gesture appears — a tall, pitched gable clad in vertical timber battens, rising above the flat-roofed volumes below it. The gable is not decorative; it is a genuine architectural response to the region's snowfall and rainfall, shedding water and snow load in a way a flat roof over a bedroom simply cannot.
At the very top, a flat, railed rooftop terrace opens above the forest canopy — furnished for outdoor seating, planters and a slatted timber pergola for shade. On a site like this, where the surrounding pines and ridgelines are the real asset, an accessible rooftop is not a luxury add-on; it is arguably the single most valuable square footage in the house, offering an unobstructed 360-degree relationship with the mountains that no interior room can match.
Seen from above, the logic of the design becomes even clearer. The building is not one continuous mass but a set of staggered rectangles and one pitched gable, stepping down and back with the slope. This aerial reading also shows how much of the roofscape has been reclaimed as usable outdoor space — the first-floor terrace and the rooftop deck together roughly double the amount of open-air living area available to the family, without adding a single extra room to the footprint.
Material choices on a hill site do two jobs at once: they have to perform against Mandi's weather — rain, snow load, temperature swings between seasons — and they have to sit comfortably in a forest setting rather than fighting it. Every material on this project was chosen with both jobs in mind.
Used across the ground floor and structural piers, stone grounds the building visually and thermally, keeping the lower level cool in summer and insulated through the colder months.
The first-floor terrace and balcony are wrapped in warm red brick, giving the family's primary outdoor room a textured, handcrafted character that ages gracefully with weather.
The pitched gable on the top floor is finished in dark, vertical timber battens — a material and a roof form both drawn directly from traditional hill-house construction in Himachal Pradesh.
Smooth off-white plaster on the upper walls keeps the composition from feeling heavy, while black-framed windows and railings tie every level together as one visual system.
"A house on a hillside should not fight the mountain for attention. It should step back, let the pines and the ridgelines lead, and simply give the family the best seat in the house — which, here, is the rooftop, at sunset, with the valley laid out below."
Beyond the elevation drawings and material palette, this project has been shaped around the everyday rhythm of a joint family home in Himachal Pradesh. The ground floor garage and covered porch mean arrivals — whether it's the family car, a delivery, or guests for a function — never depend on the weather outside. The stone archway entrance signals a formal, welcoming threshold without needing an oversized lobby to do it.
The first-floor terrace has been sized generously enough to hold a full family gathering — festivals, a small function, or simply everyone sitting together on a Sunday evening — while remaining sheltered by the floor above. It is, in many ways, the emotional centre of the house: the room where the family will spend the most unstructured time together.
Upstairs, the bedrooms have been pulled back from the noise of the entrance and terrace, each given full-height glazing so that even a private room keeps a strong visual connection to the forest outside. And above everything, the rooftop terrace is built as a genuine amenity, not an afterthought — space for a pergola, planters, morning yoga, evening tea, or simply standing at the railing and looking out over Padhar as the sun sets behind the ridgeline.
Taken together, the four levels tell a simple story: arrival and function at the base, shared family life in the middle, private rest above that, and open sky at the very top. It's a sequence that mirrors, almost exactly, how a day actually moves through a family home.
Padhar and the wider Mandi district are seeing a quiet but real shift in how residential projects are being planned — away from generic, plains-style concrete boxes, and toward homes that consciously use stone, timber, pitched roofs and covered terraces suited to hill weather and hill living. Sh. Tilak Ji's residence is very much part of that shift: a home that could only sit comfortably in a place like Padhar, built from materials the region already understands, arranged around views the site already offers.
For families in Mandi district considering a similar project — whether on a sloped plot, a forested site, or a plain roadside plot that simply needs a distinctive design language — the process demonstrated here is repeatable: read the site and its slope first, let the massing step with the land rather than against it, choose materials that perform in local weather, and reserve the best views for the spaces the family will actually use every day.
This design is currently in the pre-construction stage, with structural drawings, elevation detailing and interior planning underway. Updates on the build — from foundation to finishing — will follow as the project progresses on site in Padhar.
Whether you're building on a hillside plot in Padhar or anywhere across District Mandi, our studio designs homes that respond to your site, your slope and your family's way of living — from first sketch through to construction drawings.